Monthly Archives: January 2016

As some of you may be aware Star Trek timelines is now live on the Apple and Andriod store, well yours truly has been a beta tester for this app and so I’d like to give you a heads up on it.

You start of the game with the basic ship which you can see in the image above. The ability to upgrade your ship and crew forms just one of the many segments of the game. The choice of ships is impressive from a Steam runner class, all the way up to a Borg cube. You improve your ship by finding and collecting schematics, these are “drops” in certain missions or you can buy them from the dilithium store. Obviously buying them means you get your hands on your desired ship quicker. But it is possible to get the schematics by grinding missions, although this takes a while.

Now once you’ve got your ship you hit Warp and travel to various places in the galaxy to run faction missions, see above. The faction missions reward you with credits and item drops. The credits you accumulate and can spend in the ingame store, when you perform tasks in games you also earn chronitons. The chronitons are a second ingame currency, these you use to buy away team slots and or equipment to upgrade your officers and ship. They are also another way to get ship schematics. The time portal is in the ingame store for credits, chronitons you spend at “home planets, I.e Earth for the federation. A tip on credits, you can spend in two ways, one that’s costs a small amount and one that costs a significant amount. Save up and buy at the higher cost. The rewards this generates are bigger and can also include an officer. The third currency is the afore mentioned dilithium. This costs real money via an in game purchase. Which is a crucial point, although this app is free to download at some point your going to have to part with money in order to achieve certain things. But as they say, no such thing as a free lunch.

Your officers have slots seen on the image above, the missions you run give “drops.” These drops go in the slots when you have filled four slots you officer can rank up in ability and skill level. This part can be annoying. I once ran a mission 14 times to get the desired item I needed. Which depletes your in game energy and meant it took me the best part of a day to get one item. This increases in frustration when your officer needs to rank up to complete a mission. You see they move up in blocks of ten. I had to have an engineer with lvl 50 engineering skills to compete a section. So effectively I was stuck until I achieved this. Which brings me to faction missions and your team.

You need a varied team, some faction missions for instance need an engineer, a scientist and a medic. Others need command officers and so on. But you only have four slots per mission and your officer roster also has a fixed number of slots. This of course means you only have a fixed number of officers to choose your four “mission” officers from, well unless you buy more slots, which yes you guessed it costs real money.

The game also involves ship battles which can also be affected by the officers you choose. You start off with one slot and as you rank up you gain more slots. To get to two slots as shown above you have to be level 15 ingame. Later on they’ll also introduce pvp so you may want to make sure you have a good slot selection and ship before taking on other players.

The final element is away missions. These are linked to factions and you select officers to complete a mission, load them onto a shuttle and off they go while you carry on with the game. At the start these are quick say 30 seconds to 10 minutes. As you progress they take up to 3 hours. Keep that in mind, because you sometimes have to send your best officers on away missions in order to complete them. I ran them while I slept or started them prior to work. You officers are then available to you when you need them to run other missions.

Over all I enjoyed the game, yes it has some things that need working on, I felt ship battle was lacking. But my advice, it’s a free download so you have nothing to loose. Try it and you’ll find you can do a lot without spending money. If your enjoying it and seeing where it’s going then what you spend and how far you go is up to you.

One final thing, you need access to the Internet, so if your not in wifi watch your data limit. Oh and John de Lancie is your guide as Q.

So another has come and gone and although we never gained flying cars or hoverboards, from a Star Trek point of view we gained the revelation of a new series.

In 2017, as I’m sure your aware,a brand new series will be available. Although the details of the show, in relation to settings,cast,ships and so on are unknown. It hasn’t stopped our minds ticking over with thoughts,conjection and many discussions on social media.

Also an unknown is how they plan to make the series available outside the USA. Although many European TV companies immediately launched into action to try and be “The,” distributor for their particular country.

Also at the end of 2015 a promo video was released for the next movie. This promptly made social media once again become a fever pitch of differing view points. Some saw the clip as realisation of their worst fears, “They’ve made fast and furious in space!, there’s even a f****** motorbike doing a jump!” Was one of many comments that I saw. Many held out little hope for the film, which prompted the director and writer to take to the air waves and try to alleviate people’s fears.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XRVD32rnzOw
The one thing that did jump out at me in the clip was the fact that the Enterprise is apparently destroyed. This I have to admit I was dismayed to see. Sure the flagship of the Federation has been destroyed in movies before. What I was shocked at, was the fact that they included it in the trailer. Something as major as that, I felt sure would have been best left for us to see in the cinema. Not going into the film knowing its demise is inevitable. Still at least Deanna wasn’t flying this time.

2016 is also the 50th anniversary of our beloved franchise. Having spawned a plethora of tv,films,books,games and cos players. It’s still going strong. Alas we have sadly lost some favourite actors during 2015, including my particular favourite the awesome Leonard Nimoy. His portrayal of Spock was the thing that hooked me into Star Trek, along with the utopian view and the fact that the persecuted would be freed.

The clamour for tickets for Vegas, despite the obvious and blatant exploitation that creation are undertaking (they make the Ferengi look generous), bodes well for the future of the fan base. Which in turn bodes well for the future of the franchise, the box office returns of the last two films, $385.7 million and $467.4 million worldwide, means paramount has no hesitation in planning for a fourth film in the new universe, before the third has hit the screens. This and the new series means we have plenty to be hopeful for in regards the future.

As for Trek News and Views, well when I started the podcast way back way, after nurturing the idea for a good 6 months, it was a very uncrowned market place. Now you can’t shake an IPod with hitting a Star Trek podcast. For example when Chris owner and the man in the big chair as Trek.fm asked me to join, there was only the Ready Room, which I see as TNVs cultured and less chaotic big brother. As well as the hyper channel, while Chris mulled various other ideas in his head. Whereas now Trek Fm has 22 podcasts in its feed, of which I’m glad to say I created 3.

Podcasting is something I enjoy and although due to ill health I no longer have an active podcast, I still enjoy appearing on other peoples shows. The Lou Trek Show have been very active is inviting me on and I do enjoy podcasting with Lou and James. http://www.trekmate.org.uk/category/the-battle-bridge/

The Battle Bridge is also part of another network where I have made guest appearances on a variety of shows, the Trekmate network.

Along with Trekmate,Trek fm and other friends in podcasting such as The Gatecast Podcast http://gatecast.co.uk and the awesome Treknologic http://www.treknologic.com, the Scifi Diner podcast & The Babylon Project I’ve been blessed with both friendship and podcasting opportunities.

So I was able to keep my hand in so to speak, while my co hosts made it easy to have time of for various medical reasons as and when needed, of course Steve is a Borg and Drogyn never appears to take off his racing helmet, but it’s part of the charm.

But I digress and also I’m waffling a bit. 2016 is a year I’m hoping will be a good one, free from death and other soul sapping instances. One of joy and fun and opportunity, one where this blog will be more active and one where I hope to return to Star Trek podcasting, my head is still full of ideas and thoughts.